Feedback on our evaluation criteria

[Fischers Fritz]

Dear colleagues,

I recently informed an associate of the GNU ethical repository criteria
evaluations. I relay his critiques.

  1. It is good that we have a summary of the reason for a repository
  failing to move up the next grade. For example, it is good that we
  say this:

    Things that prevent github.com from moving up to the next grade, C:

    * Important site functionality does not work without running nonfree
    JavaScript. (C0)

  However, he would like to have link to the detailed evaluation
  of the relevant criterion. He explains, if I am the one running
  the repository, I want instructions of how I can improve the score.

  2. The evaluations are inconsistent among different repositories.
  For example, we say that "[t]he worst thing that github.com does is
  to encourage bad licensing practice: failure to include a license,
  failure to state the license on each source file, and failure
  to specify 'version 3 or later' when using the GNU GPL. (B2)"
  But we don't say this about, e.g., GitLab, which has the same issue.

And now I add my comments on how we could address his concerns.

  1. In the above example of GitHub getting grade F for important
  site functionality requiring nonfree JavaScript, for example,
  we could perhaps link to an email list discussion where we refer
  to a particular instance of important functionality breaking
  when we don't run a particular nonfree JavaScript.

  I believe we do in fact provide these details to the
  repository management as directions on how to improve their scores,
  but we don't mention them in repo-criteria-evaluation.html.
  By not mentioning them, we apparently create the impression that
  we don't try to assist services in improving their scores.

  2. I suspect that the inconsistencies stem from the evaluations
  having happened at different times, maybe by different people.

Finally, I remarked during our conversation that it is inconvenient
to have only criteria for GNU projects, not also for non-GNU projects.
The ethical criteria for GNU projects it is the best guide I have
for non-GNU projects, so I abuse it for that purpose, and this is
confusing for the people I tell about it, even though I tell them
to ignore the criteria are specific to GNU projects.

I believe we could assist non-GNU projects in exercising their freedom
if we would publish criteria and evaluations of ethical repository services.
I don't really care how we come up with them, but I provide a suggestion
to demonstrate that I believe this is an easy task. I believe we could
create such a criterion by adjusting the present criteria as follows.

1. Clarify that the criteria apply only to source code hosting websites;
   some projects may want to use non-website source code hosting.
2. Create a new grade "C-" with the full title
   "C- -- Acceptable hosting for a non-GNU package".
3. Assuming we consider it is acceptable for non-GNU packages that their
   code hosting repository does not permit access by Tor (C3) and has
   non-GNU licensing recommendations (C5), move criteria C0, C1, C2, C4,
   and C6 from grade "C" to grade "C-".

With great honor,
Fritz